[GreenKeys] RIP Carl Gauss, and happy birthday Paul Tibbets!

[Dave Horsfall]

Mathematician, astronomer, and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss got 
demagnetised on this day in 1855; the old unit of magnetism, the Gauss (G) 
is named after him (so keep that in mind the next time you use your 
selector magnets).  Trivia: as a school-kid, his class was set the problem 
of adding up all the numbers from 1 to 100 (the teacher must've been a bit 
of a bastard).  As the rest of the class laboured away with chalk and 
board, young Carl realised that the sequence 1 + 2 + 3 + ... + 100 is the 
same as (1 + 100) + (2 + 99) ... etc, which reduces to 101 + 101 + 101 ... 
i.e. 101 * 50, and he turned in the only correct answer within minutes. 
He went on to derive the general formula for sum(1..N), which is 
(N*(N+1)/2).

But we gained Col. Paul Tibbets K4ZVZ in 1915; he is well-known as the 
pilot of a certain B-29, the Enola Gay...

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."